An AI lab out of China has ignited panic throughout Silicon Valley after releasing AI models that can outperform America’s best despite being built more cheaply and with less-powerful chips
Why China's DeepSeek is putting America's AI lead in jeopardy
cheaply and less powerful
So AI could be more sustainable this whole time? Interesting…
Who wants to bet their AI will be used for more useful things too?
AI, as in machine learning, has always had uses. Like, real useful additions to human capability. It’s very useful in pattern recognition and statistical analysis of various things.
Our more modern shit connotation comes from capitalists trying replace labor with generative AI, which is a small subset of potential machine learning uses, but by its nature sends massive amounts of shlock at us.
ML has made our xsh translations coherent.
Having dealt with ML engineers in depth before, American tech companies tend to throw blank checks their way which, combined with them not tending to have backgrounds in optimization or infrastructure, means they spin up 8 billion GPU instances in the cloud and use 10% of them ever because engineers are lazy.
They could, without any exaggeration, reduce their energy consumption by a factor of ten with about two weeks of honest engineering work. Yes this bothers the fuck out of me.
That's my biggest gripe with mainstream closed source AI, they can optimize some of their most powerful MLAs to run on a potato but... they don't. And they'll never open source becaue it'd be forked by people who are genuinely passionate about improvement.
AKA they'd be run outta business in no time.
Who wants to bet their AI will be used for more useful things too?
Unlike in the West where if Nvidia tanks then the entire US economy goes down with it.
So AI could be more sustainable this whole time? Interesting…
Yeah a lot of the breakthrough research has happened via cheaper / resource limited methods now that the cat is out of the bag. We live in interesting times.
Man, at this rate, China is going to somehow create a cryptocurrency or NFT that actually works and isn't a scam.
BRICScoin when
Well they are looking to create an alternative currency to USD for global trade.
An incredible outcome would be if the US stock market bubble pops because Chinese developed open-source AI that can run locally on your phone end up being about as good as Silicon Valley's stuff.
I think the bubble might not pop so easily. Even if Microsoft is set back dramatically by this, investors have nowhere else to go. The whole industry is in a turmoil, and since there's nothing else to invest into, stocks stay high.
At least that's how i explain the ludicrously high stock rates that we're seeing in the recent years.
Llms that run locally are already a thing, and I wager that one of those smaller models can do 99% of anything anyone would want.
I've been messing around with deepseek, and I can already tell it's much smoother and more coherent than chatgpt or gemini.
It also doesn't have the limiters of the American LLMs, where they accidentally generate a true statement about history or politics that doesn't show the US in a good light, and then have to stop and argue themselves back into the neoliberal / US state department position.
I was mostly looking to see if it would answer questions without huge HR style disclaimers , but yeah , it doesn't like to generate responses on current world leaders
Deepseek made a mistake with the first query I asked it, so from that sample of 1 I'm treating it with the same caution as any of the current LLMs.
I asked it about testing an electronics part (an Integrated Circuit chip) and it confidently told me how to test an imaginary 16-pin version of the chip.
The IC in question has 8 pins.
When I followed up by asking "why pin 16" it confidently responded with a little lecture about what pin 16 does and just how important pin 16 is.
Once I'd proved to it that the IC has 8 pins, I got this:
"You're absolutely correct that the MN3101 is an 8-pin DIP (Dual Inline Package) chip. My earlier reference to pin 16 was incorrect, and I appreciate your clarification. Let me provide accurate information for the MN3101 (8-pin DIP)."
The thing is that these chips have a unique Id (the name) and publicly available datasheets that explain, amongst other things, how many pins they have.
You can try the “deepthink” option or add the search option next time. Those options will eat up a lot of the context window but you’ll get much better results for technical questions. It’s still all just LLMs though so caution is warranted.
tried this now and it just generated a biography titled "Chinese Revolutionary Leader"
This is about to make me go
AI
AI, China
china is reaching levels of basedness long thought impossible
this but unironically
Why is it based when China does it? It's still bazinga until I hear otherwise, glad they're owning the Yanks tho
I know this shit keeping em awake because mandem talking about 500 billion investment while they're ringing the alarm on an open source AI
___Space race all over again
Space race but instead of human achievement it's who can generate the most slop possible.
And China is winning with only one hand. The other is building high speed rail
"B-but the tech sanctions were supposed to protect our treat machine scam?! I don't understand!"
mashallah xi ai can continue to lead china prosperously long after xi is gone
computer, write me a happy song that references China having many sputnik moments and scaring the shit out of western chauvinists
I feel like they could have picked a better name than deepseek
seepdeek?
I dunno. What about one of eight immortals that would astrally project in his sleep to learn secrets of thr universe. That's be chill. Li Tieguai I think just really scare the west with it
Seekdeek
It was spun off from a hedge fund, so the name reflects that.
I downloaded DeepSeekv3 yesterday but I dunno how to actually run it. I gotta see wtf to do this weekend and see what all the fuss is about.
With ollama and openwebui you can get a pretty featured experience.
There's a web client too if you want to just give it a test spin
There's an official Android app in the Google Play store. Search for Deepseek. You just have to register an account, then you're at the races
Time to move those goalposts again, posters. Please reassure me that these models will in fact still destroy all life on earth because your google image searches got worse.
The headline is misleading. DeepSeek outperforms some benchmarks by <1%, and underperforms on some by 1-5%.
Not that there's a need to lie - China is still winning. Deepseek is definitely cheaper, enormously, massively so, and on-par with other latest AI models. I'm not sure it's totally positive news, because cheaper AI tends to mean more overall spending on AI, but China winning in this space is a definite lesser evil.
P=0.05?